Author’s Note

Well,here we are again, dear reader, at the nexus of God and sex. I didn’t want to leave you without clearing up a couple things.
The Servants of the Good Shepherd are a fictitious order, although there are orders throughout the world with similar names. The practices and missions you see in these pages are cobbled together from various monastic groups; every group has its own rules regarding habits, solitude, service and vows, and the rules I gathered together for SotGS of Kansas City, I stole with an author’s eye. That is to say that everything Zenny does and encounters is real somewhere, but like the magpie I am, I shamelessly stitched together the things I found the most pageworthy. For further reading about the lives of modern American nuns, I cannot recommend highly enough Unveiled: The Hidden Lives of Nuns by Cheryl L. Reed. And when it comes to Christianity at large, Wearing God by Lauren F. Winner as well as an old favorite, Unprotected Texts by Jennifer Wright Knust, were huge influences in my composition of Zenny’s faith and Sean’s journey back to it.
Sean’s mother dies in very similar circumstances to my own mother’s death in 2014—that being said, my knowledge of medical practice is as limited as you might imagine a full-time writer’s would be, and I take full responsibility for any places where my memory and research fall short. I have to credit a few books for helping me grapple with the stark reality of ICU death and what comes after—Modern Death by Haider Warraich, Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty, and Being Mortal by Atul Gawande.
Thank you, dear reader, for walking down this path with me. I threw God, sex, death, belief and unbelief at you, and while I know perspectives on those things differ wildly for every person, I’m grateful you were willing to see what they looked like for Sean. I would promise to start taking it easier on those Bell brothers, but, well, we all know how untrustworthy I am when it comes to being nice to my characters…